The Chocolate King Who Would Be President

Against this backdrop, Poroskenko seemingly cemented his rise. And he did so in what appears to be a classic of Ukrainian backroom deal-making: According to various sources and publishedreports, his frontrunner status was sealed at the end of March when he made a deal with Vitali Klitschko, the world-titled boxer with a Ph.D. who had been polling second in the presidential race. Klitschko and Poroshenko were reportedly brought together by a Ukrainian oligarch with close ties to Putin, Dmitry Firtash, who amazingly enough appears to have convened the talks in Vienna while on bail and facing extradition to the United States in connection with alleged bribery of Indian officials involved in a titanium mining deal. While details are scarce, it is indisputable that soon after the talks Klitschko stepped aside and threw his support to Poroshenko, who in turn is now supporting Klitschko’s candidacy for mayor of Kyiv—a position Klitschko has run for, and lost, three times. “The only way to win is by nominating a single candidate from the democratic ranks,” Klitschko said at the joint press conference announcing the alliance. “This should be a candidate with the greatest support from the people.”

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That leaves the presidential race between Poroshenko and Yulia Tymoshenko, a two-time former prime minister. Tymoshenko ran for president in 2010 and was trounced by Viktor Yanukovych, a symbol of the failed promise of the Orange Revolution. She was then arrested and convicted in 2011 of embezzlement and abuse of power, charges she and her supporters alleged were entirely politically motivated. She became an international cause célèbre while in jail, known for her golden traditional braids piled high on her head and her hunger strikes. She emerged from jail, triumphant, after Yanukovych fled the country. Tymoshenko has since returned to politics with gusto (and without the braids), but she trails at a far distant second in the polls.

An Oligarch for All Seasons

By Margaret Slattery

If Petro Poroshenko wins on Sunday, he may have a wanted man to thank. In March, the Ukrainian gas titan Dmitry Firtash summoned two of the country’s presidential candidates to a luxury hotel in Vienna to hash out a political deal, leaving Poroshenko poised to become Ukraine’s first elected president since the ouster of Viktor Yanukovych in February. Poroshenko’s opponent, Yulia Tymoshenko—a longtime rival of Firtash’s—now trails badly in the polls.

But Firtash’s involvement in the pact was no accident, and it raises serious questions for the United States. The reason the meeting took place in Vienna? Firtash—who owns the international conglomerate Group DF and has a net worth estimated as high as several billion dollars (he won’t say exactly)—was arrested there by Austrian authorities in March at the request of the FBI. He was indicted on charges, stemming from an investigation that began in 2006, that he paid $18.5 million in bribes to Indian officials as part of a titanium mining deal. After getting out on more than $170 million bail, Firtash, 49, is now awaiting an extradition hearing. (He denies the charges and has hired 20 lawyers, including the well-known Washington fixer Lanny Davis.)

On the same March day of the arrest, President Obama was meeting at the White House with Ukraine’s interim prime minister, expressing support for the country while Russian President Vladimir Putin prepared to annex the Crimean Peninsula. And that’s where Firtash’s story gets even more interesting. Despite backing Poroshenko, Firtash has close ties to Yanukovych through the ousted president’s former chief of staff. Firtash is also suspected of doing business with both the Kremlin (he jointly owned a gas trading company with Gazprom, the Russian state oil company) and the notorious Ukrainian-born, Russia-based mobster Semion Mogilevich (Firtash admitted as much to a U.S. ambassador, according to a leaked 2008 diplomatic cable, though he now denies it). U.S. officials have said the timing of Firtash’s arrest was not tied to the political turmoil in Ukraine, but it came just as the Treasury Department began sanctioning Russian oligarchs in response to the Crimean annexation. “I’m ready to act as a negotiator between Russia and Ukraine,” Firtash plainly told Bloomberg earlier this month. “If Ukrainian politicians are impotent, I have to step in.”

Correction: An earlier version gave an incorrect month for the meeting in Vienna.

The two rivals broadly claim to agree on the pro-Western policy they would follow if elected, and each has instead spent much energy on the campaign trail accusing the other of secretly colluding with Putin and the Russians. In fact, it was Tymoshenko who reportedly leaked the Firtash meeting to the press, suggesting afterwards that Poroshenko’s business interests in Russia were the reason. Following the meeting, Poroshenko’s chocolate plants and bank accounts in Russia—disputed on and off since a trade war broke out last year—had been unblocked, she claimed pointedly. “Such things don’t happen without Putin’s blessing,” local media reported her as saying. Meanwhile, according to Poroshenko, his accounts are still frozen—a fact he is trumpeting to prove “that the policy I stick to is pro-Ukrainian,” as he put it recently. “I believe that this is the sign that I do everything right.”

It’s all so reminiscent of the last post-revolutionary circus. Back in2004, protesters occupied the same Maidan for two months after a sham election in which then-president Leonid Kuchma tried to pass power to his political protégé, the Russia-backed candidate Yanukovych. Eventually, opposition candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, was declared the winner. But within a year, disillusionment with the Orange Revolution reigned supreme. The running joke in the capital was nothing changed during Yushchenko’s presidency except that bribes were increased by 100 percent. In 2010, the Ukrainians who actually went out to vote, mostly fairly, elected Yanukovych, the same man they had come out against in 2004—and the same man they would oust again three years later.

Between revolutions, Ukraine’s economy crumbled—the country’s GDP grew zero percent in the last two years—and the culture of corruption remained unchanged. Ukraine now ranks the worst in Europe in Transparency International’s corruption rankings; even Russia has a better score. So there is much disillusion that the presidential campaign has come down to Poroshenko and Tymoshenko, who have already been in power and bear as much responsibility as others in the country’s venal establishment for Ukraine’s political and economic malaise.

Petro Poroshenko and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, at the parliament in Kyiv in June 2006. | GENIA SAVILOV/AFP/Getty Images

Indeed, whenever I asked Ukrainians to explain to me the appeal of Poroshenko in this presidential race, I heard not enthusiasm but something decidedly more tempered. He was, I was told repeatedly, “the best of the worst.” And besides, others insisted to me, he would “probably steal the least.” Not exactly inspiring stuff for a country that’s wondering how it can possibly expect the same political elite that got Ukraine into this mess to make a serious run at dismantling the system that made them what they are today.

“Ukraine has a great opportunity to clean up its act, to reform its economy, to improve its governance, to attack corruption, as people said they wanted to do,” says William B. Taylor, who served as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 2006 to 2009. “They have the opportunity again. I hope they learned from the Orange Revolution. … Almost all of them had something with their past. The question is: What are they doing going forward?”

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The real cancer of Ukraine is corruption; it has been entrenched by every government Ukraine has had since independence. “You have to imagine people sitting in government buildings, thousands of them, all across this city in particular, the capital Kyiv, and they’re stealing all they can, every day. And that’s been happening for 24 years,” says Ivan Lozowy, a political analyst in Ukraine’s troubled capital. “Imagine 30 large government buildings here in Kyiv, and underneath them are these huge pipes, leading outwards like a network, and the pipes are just funneling out money, all the time.”

Since the Soviet breakup in 1991, access to profit has been about proximity to political power. This pattern was set during the waning years of the USSR, when members of the communist nomenklatura had started amassing cash. As state assets were being privatized, they purchased heavy industry on the cheap. Politicians who assisted them or looked the other way got kickbacks. During the 1990s, the bonds between those nascent oligarchs and politicians were cemented: Those who had access to the power made the money, and those with the power to help them get the money were funded in a closed feedback cycle of mutually beneficial corruption. Oligarchs in Ukraine emerged in clans known by their regions—Donetsk, Dnepropitrosk and Kyiv—each with their own political agenda.

It was in this freewheeling atmosphere that Poroshenko, considered part of the Kyiv clan, first drew attention. He was born in a Russian-speaking home in Odessa, the famous port on the Black Sea, and his father was a so-called “red director,” a Soviet factory boss. The son got his start selling cocoa beans, speculating on black pepper or starting a consultancy firm, depending on which interview you read. (There is a saying about oligarchs, here as in elsewhere in the post-Soviet world: Don’t ask about the first million.) Either way, he made a bundle of cash while he was still a student at the international relations and law department of the Taras Shevchenko National University in Kyiv. He was, his former professor, Alexander Zadorozhny told me, a standout—not just an ambitious joiner in the communist youth league, but its leader.

Sarah A. Topol is a journalist based in Istanbul. Follow her on Twitter @satopol